This post over at Marginal Revolution is getting a lot of attention. Steve Sailer is filling the comments thread, which always brings out a lot of responses. The discussion about Obama is following the usual path. Even his supporters struggle to accept that he is a bright guy. That’s always been a strange thing about Obama-mania. The concept of the “first black president” overwhelmed any discussion of the man. His biggest fans know little about him.

There’s something else which I think will make Obama a curiosity for generations to come. The man lacks the usual traits we associate with leadership. There’s no evidence of physical courage. He is an awkward dufus who seems timid and aloof. All of our post-war presidents have been manly, for lack of a better word. He also lacks the risk taking trait. Again, even his biggest fans describe him as excessively cautious. He is also indecisive. This is something his fans loath about him. The man never makes a decision until the initiative is long lost.

I can see how critics would point to these defects and conclude it is a lack of IQ. He’s smart enough to know he is not smart enough so he waits until the smart people decide and then he jumps on-board. That’s a possibility, but being a genius has never been a desirable quality in leaders. Obama is at least as smart as Bush or Clinton, which is to say smart enough. The decisiveness of Bush and Clinton was more than enough to overcome whatever intellectual challenges they faced.

I’m fond of saying that Obama is our first alien president. I do that to piss of lefty, for the most part. But, the guy is a singular weirdo in our political history. Everyone in the ruling class is alien to normal Americans, but Obama is alien to the aliens. By the time a candidate is nominated, we know everything there is to know about him from birth to that moment. With Obama, we’re still not sure about large swaths of his life, including where he was born. He never tells stories about his youth or about when he was starting out in life. No one shows up on TV talking about their friendship with Obama. It’s as if he exists conceptually, but not tangibly.

Anyway, I think scholars will be puzzling over this guy long after I’m dust.

7 Responses to 'Obama the Weirdo'

He looked the part (or someone’s idea of what a leader looks like) and the Democratic marketing and hype machines got to work on grooming / manufacturing an image for him. It hasn’t worked out too well for the country but I suspect it won’t be the last time this strategy is used.

Just to be clear, I’ve never thought the place of his birth was of any importance. The Founders conception of citizenship meant a citizen at birth. Being the child of a citizen was all that would have mattered.

That said, it is another weird log on the weirdo pyre. Not having a birth certificate is not normal.

Every person has his own secret identity. Conqueror, patriot, martyr, etc. Obama’s is the Liberator. His secret self is the Black Liberator, risen from obscurity, suffering slings, arrows, and jail time from his people’s oppressors, rising in the end to lift up his people (as Nelson Mandela did). This is the Black Liberation theology he heard in church for twenty years. Except that he didn’t suffer, he was pampered all along, and traded off of his mysterious undefinable background for easy bennies all along. Now he represents “his” oppressed people, blacks and gays. The enemy, the republicans, never quit, they are evil, anything extraconstitutional done in his name is justified in order to fight evil. He is the only one who now brings up Kenya (fits the meme), the school records are off limits (they don’t fit the liberation meme), and golf is the way to “stick it to the man” in his own back yard. A figurative dancing on the graves of his enemies. The meme and the reality are so at odds, how much cognitive dissonance must this man, and his supporters, suffer through on a daily basis? How much denial of reality at the top can our nation suffer, without being lost? How much tearing down of our institutions must be tolerated, in service to one man’s self image that is a totally fictitious and self-serving construct?

Answer: Obama was born in HAWAII. In fact, Obama has shown his HAWAII birth certificate twice, the short-form (the official birth certificate) and the long form. He has shown both the images on the Web and the actual physical copies. The official physical copy of the long form was passed around in the White House press room. THREE Republican and several Democrat officials in Hawaii have confirmed the facts on Obama’s birth certificate and repeatedly confirmed that they sent both the short form and long form to him.

And Obama’s birth in Hawaii in 1961 is also confirmed by the public Index Data file and the birth notices sent to the Hawaii newspapers in 1961 by the DOH of Hawaii (and ONLY the DOH of Hawaii could send birth notices to that section of the newspapers, the “Health Bureau Statistics” section, where Obama’s birth notice was published, and it only did so for births IN Hawaii).

ALSO, birthers do not even have proof that Obama’s mother had a passport in 1961. They seriously want us to believe that there is a reasonable chance that Obama’s mother traveled at great expense and risk to a foreign country late in pregnancy DESPITE there being a birth certificate for Obama that shows that he was born in Hawaii, without even showing that she had a US passport. (And perhaps one in a million US women traveled internationally late in pregnancy in 1961 due to the high risk of stillbirth). And, no, Obama’s Kenyan grandmother actually NEVER said that he was born in Kenya. That was simply made up by birther sites that cut off the taped interview just BEFORE she was asked “Where was he born?” She really said: “In Hawaii, where his father was studying at the time.”

(1) Obama’s relatives would have had to have been rich enough (and they weren’t. In 1961 Obama’s grandfather was a furniture salesman, and his grandmother was a low-level employee in a bank [she did not become a vice president until 1970], and his father went from Kenya to Hawaii on a free flight) and dumb enough to send their daughter at high risk of stillbirth to a foreign country to give birth—-—despite there being fine hospitals in Hawaii;

(2) Obama’s mother would have had to have traveled overseas ALONE (since WND has proven with a FOI Act request that Obama senior stayed in Hawaii throughout 1961) and somehow got Obama back to the USA without getting him entered on her US passport or getting a visa for him (which would have had to have been applied for in a US consulate in that country and the records would still exist);

(3) Obama’s relative would have had to have gotten the officials in Hawaii to record his birth in Hawaii despite (as birthers claim) his being born in another country and somehow got the teacher who wrote home to her father, named Stanley, about the birth in Hawaii of a child to a woman named Stanley to lie (and since the woman’s father’s name really was Stanley, Obama’s relatives would have had to have found one of the very few women in Hawaii with fathers of that name to do it).

If you sincerely believe that Obama could have been born in a foreign country, then you could answer all three points. For Obama to have been born in a foreign country, all three would have had to have happened.

So, the question is, what are the chances that all three happened?

(Oh, and there isn’t even proof that Obama’s mother had a passport in 1961, and very very few 18-year-olds did, and EXTREMELY few women traveled abroad late in pregnancy in 1961 because of the risk of stillbirths. Yet birther sites hope that a few GULLIBLE people will just assume that she was one of the few to have a passport and one of the extremely few women to travel abroad late in pregnancy, and that the birth certificate is forged and the officials of BOTH parties who have confirmed it and the Index Data and the birth notices sent to the Hawaii newspapers and the teacher who wrote home are all lying. )